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Pentagon taking a more serious look at off-the-shelf technology

It seems rather straightforward: Buy technology that is already available rather than spend money reinventing the wheel.

For the Pentagon, this has been easier said than done. The Defense Department’s top leadership has made a big push to accelerate innovation in weapons programs by injecting fresh technology from the commercial world. But parlaying that credo into action has been difficult.

In search of a better way to insert off-the-shelf technology into military weapon systems is the Strategic Capabilities Office. The four-year-old organization, known as SCO, has set about to find mature technologies that can be matched with existing Pentagon programs and tweaked to produce “transformational” results at much lower cost than traditional developed-from-scratch defense projects.